Still on the quest of the best way to build a working eXist and update it cleanly, we've been testing the dist-zip build target. First, though, I determined how to build with DS's patch for the bug I reported the other day, which is still only a pull request (#1256); CLI for future reference:

git pull
git checkout 1256
git fetch origin pull/1256/head:1256
git checkout 1256

Then we do:

./build.sh clean
./build.sh 
./build.sh jnlp-all

the last of which signs the jars, enabling the Java client to work. This gives us a working build in the repo context, but of course it's cluttered up with lots of unwanted stuff, including source. That's why we wanted to use the dist-zip target, but the result is currently broken due to an obscure timestamping issue which I reported today on the gmane list. We could manually create a clean tree, of course, but it would be easier to have a script do it.